«all the ways i try to break wordpress»

Jesus loves you, natalie jost.

it annoys me no end when designers build barely-functional themes (no do_action() hooks, only and index.php and a page.php, no templates.)(applicable to weeds, but not to her latest), and then think that their leftover handouts with no images, only their absolute-concept-of-beauty color scheme are worth more than my hosting charges for a year.

designers shouldn’t be looking to sell templates on the back of an open-source platform. design is a contract based profession. a good design involves assessing a client’s needs, and a give-and-take process. i have no problem with making money hand-over-fist for doing that well. but a template involves none of that.

WordPress exists because automattic and the original creators of b2 wanted there to be a publishing platform for anyone to use. I personally think there should be a publishing platform that’s not ugly for everyone to use. to say that templates are worth being paid for, but the underlying platform that built in the ability to use templates should be free, i think, is greedy. it slights developers, and it insults the community by claiming to be above them.

here’s where the whole thing gets really abstruse: for pay themes are necessarily worse quality than GPL ones. because for pay themes can’t access the wordpress API. natalie avoids this in the dumbest of ways. check out the instructions in her CSS:

You can flip the position of the posts and sidebar by simply changing the float properties from left to right and right to left (one right, the other left). Those are found in the stylesheet under #sidebar and #content.

somebody hasn’t been reading lorelle’s rants about designing for wordpress.com. but then, she can’t really use tutorials on how to use options pages, without falling under the GPL. Of course, she could make themes as good as theundersigned’s, as long as she didn’t redistribute.